Donald Trump appears to be trying to get Kim Jong Un’s attention. On 16 August, as the US military was preparing to begin annual joint military exercises with South Korea, their commander-in-chief publicly denounced the whole enterprise. “Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, he was “not happy” that the US had agreed to take part in the exercises, which he described as “totally inappropriate and hostile.”
It was too late to cancel the drills, Trump complained, so he had instructed the US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” them instead. For as long as he had been president, he insisted, North Korea had been “unthreatening and respectful,” omitting the fact that Pyongyang has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal, tested increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles, and supplied weapons, ammunition, and troops to Russia to sustain its war against Ukraine. By contrast, he was displeased with the South Korean government, which he accused of declining to join his efforts to bring about the “Denuclearisation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
This charm offensive did not end there. Over the weekend, Trump had posted a photo of his meeting with a solemn-faced Kim in the demilitarised zone that divides North and South Korea in 2019. Despite the “unfriendly look” in that particular picture, “there are many where we’re smiling,” the US president enthused. “Kim Jong Un and I get along GREAT!” On 17 August, he posted a meme of Kim holding a telephone with the caption, “Hey Donald, we cool… right?”
The response from Pyongyang, in public at least, has been silence.
By showering Kim with praise and voluntarily scaling back the US-South Korea drills, which North Korean officials have long similarly characterised as “hostile”, it is possible that Trump hopes to rekindle the diplomatic bromance between the two leaders from his first term. This yielded three high-profile meetings between Kim and Trump in 2018 and 2019, but no progress whatsoever in persuading the former to relinquish his nuclear arsenal. Trump walked away from their summit in Hanoi in 2019 when it became clear that Kim was not prepared to make serious concessions and the diplomatic process petered out.
Kim has even less reason to compromise now. Back then, Russia and China were still nominally committed to enforcing international sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear and missile programmes and Kim was only just emerging from the diplomatic isolation that characterised his first five years in power. Seven years later, he has a new security partnership with Russia, which has also delivered an important source of hard capital and, likely, technical assistance, as well as strengthening his hand in dealings with China. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has already effectively conceded North Korea’s status as a de factor nuclear power. Pyongyang has made clear that it will only engage in further talks with Washington on the basis that North Korea is accepted as a “nuclear weapons state”.
There are still reasons Kim might be interested in another round of talks. The last period of summitry with the Americans forced Xi Jinping to pay much closer attention to Kim as he demonstrated that he had other potential suitors, a dynamic that has only been strengthened by his burgeoning relationship with Putin. Whereas Xi and Kim did not meet at all during their first five years as leaders, after Trump and Kim agreed to meet in early 2018, Xi met Kim four times over the next 12 months. So far this year, Xi’s only overseas trip has been a state visit to Pyongyang. If Trump is already offering concessions in advance by unilaterally scaling back the military drills, then perhaps Kim might be tempted to see what else he can extract.
At the same time, Trump’s outreach to Pyongyang puts South Korea’s government – a longstanding American ally – in a difficult situation. While the current president Lee Jae-myung has advocated engagement with North Korea, this does not mean he wants to abandon deterrence, particularly at a time when Pyongyang has formally given up its previous commitment to eventual reunification and branded Seoul the “invariable principal enemy”.
The American military presence in South Korea, and their annual joint exercises, have long been intended to signal to Pyongyang that the US would – and could – fight to defend the country against a North Korean attack. Trump’s repeated complaints about the cost of basing US forces on the peninsula and his derisive attitude towards US alliances more broadly risk seriously undermining that message. The dangers are two-fold – that North Korea ultimately becomes convinced that it can act with impunity, and that South Korea believes it must take security into its own hands. Opinion polls already show a majority of South Koreans now support developing their own nuclear deterrent as doubts increase about the US’s long-term reliability.
There is also the issue of sheer capacity. With US stocks of missile defence interceptors significantly depleted by the war with Iran, and the USS George Washington – the US Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier – currently en-route from its permanent base in Japan to the Middle East, American adversaries and allies alike have reason to question the US’s current capabilities to respond to a contingency elsewhere.
Then, there is the strategic incoherence. At the same time that Trump insists he is fighting to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, he is openly praising a dictator who is not only expanding his own nuclear arsenal, but also developing the missile capabilities needed to threaten the US. Trump is undermining his own logic as well as the US’s credibility. It is no secret that Trump admires strongman leaders – his praise for Xi and Putin is well-documented – but his unrequited bromance towards Kim Jong Un risks more than simply embarrassing himself.
[Further reading: The Age of Trump is dying]
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